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MC-IEF - Intra-European Fellowships (IEF)

Objective

"This project combines different analyses of dental morphology with experimental animal husbandry to improve both the ability of palaeontologists to reconstruct past environments and to improve the welfare of ungulates in captivity. Specifically, this project will test the effect of different diets on tooth morphology and wear (both in terms of changes in tooth shape, and in terms of absolute dental tissue loss) using experimental data that are rarely available for dental research. Tooth data will be obtained from feeding trial experiments of a model animal, the goat (Capra hircus), and from wild and captive individuals of giraffe and black rhino. These will be used to quantify tooth wear at different time scales and resolutions. We will employ geometric morphometrics and the mesowear method to CT scan of the goat teeth. On the same specimens, microtexture analysis will be used to quantify tooth wear at small spatial resolution (tooth facets). We will increase degrees of abrasiveness in the food, a key difference in mammalian diets in moist and arid climates, to help unravel the mechanism of tooth wear in relation to diet on herbivorous mammals. Faecal silica will also be analysed to provide a quantitative proxy for diet abrasiveness in experimental goats as well as other captive ungulates. This project also aims to link experimental results on tooth wear with the care of domestic and captive animals. We will focus on the giraffe and the black rhino to determine whether excessive or unusual wear in captive specimens is the result of improper dietary rations."